american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

86 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
predator that has eaten the refugees: “History licks” “the corners of its
bloody mouth.” Simic’s vision of this horrifying world of “paradise” is
so expansive that it includes the lens of history through which we
understand that world.
“Paradise Motel” has a biting, parodic voice that renders absurd
war, isolated individualism, and the idea of “paradise.” After all, every
paradise requires large swaths of disaster and horror elsewhere in
order to make it identifiable as a paradise, each of which is necessarily
apart from less-desirable places. Further, entering paradise requires an
individual to isolate oneself from those parts of the world where
refugees suffer and presidents make them disappear. Finally, a paradise
such as a postcolonial island in the Caribbean is only paradise to visitors,
not to impoverished residents who drive taxis, clean hotel bathrooms,
and live in shacks.
“Cameo Appearance” also has a sardonic voice, but a desperate
one. Its first-person speaker plays a more prominent role, but he is an
unreal amalgamation of war refugees the world over. The speaking
“I” does not rely on experience, but on a depressingly comic and surreal
displacement characteristic of refugee experiences in general.
Vendler’s assertion that Simic is “the best political poet, in a large
sense, on the American scene” is borne out in this poem. For her,
Simic’s poems are “more terrifying in their human implications than
explicit political documentation” (“Totemic Sifting” 131–132) based
on experience, ideological commitment, or the direct protest of
sociopolitical ills. Simic’s grand vision is haunting precisely because it
is not grounded in experience or context.
“Cameo Appearance” bears many similarities to “Paradise Motel”—
a conspicuous absence of geopolitical context, a war-torn world, a caricatured
leader, and refugees—but it has a more prominent
first-person speaker. However, this speaker is again a nonentity who
cannot recognize himself in the world of the poem. “Cameo
Appearance” takes its cue from a Theater of the Absurd as practiced in
the mid-twentieth century by, among others, Antonin Artaud in
France, Edward Albee and Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) in the United
States, and Osvaldo Dragún in Argentina. 5 The poem shows the
speaker playing a typecast role as “one of the / Bombed and fleeing
humanity” from a war-torn “burning city” (97). The speaker, moreover,
quite literally performs this role. The poem begins with the selfconsciously
absurd assertion: “I had a small, nonspeaking part / In a
bloody epic.” Immediately, Simic creates a remarkably expansive context;
the speaker laconically confuses any divide between reality and
fiction, dramatic actors and real-life agents. In the process, Simic